Watch Sunday night at 6.30 on 7 tonight!!!

[Smoke Jaguar]

I hope not! As I was reading the transcript of him speaking at the Inquiry hearing thingy, I kept laughing and reading it to DP because it was just so stupid - every turn he took he was cornered with very little effort! Why anyone keeps asking for his opinion is beyond me - he has no personal experience with HB whatsoever. At least ask a GP or OB who's attended HB's, puhlease
And this statement from the family in the US confirms all of our suspicions, too:

Jenifer Holloman is the woman from the US who was interviewed on the Sunday Night Show last night. She has sent me several emails this morning and has asked if I can forward this statement on her behalf to anyone who may have been watching the show.



"I would like to impart to all Australian women and their families- that our family is so disappointed with how Australia Sunday Night chose to edit our story down to its most tragic details and infer through their choice of tableaus and pictures of our grieving family, that we somehow wanted to be portrayed as nothing more than victims of bad home birth midwifery where a doctor saved the day.

The doctor is just a part of the story, perhaps if I had used a more negative word instead of "poor doctor" they would have edited it differently- For the record, the same doctor will not help us in our efforts to hold this midwife accountable, he has not even returned my letter and follow up phone call requesting his help in this matter. We have invited him to hold this midwife accountable for her actions that affected him and his staff. As I like to say: "Apparently, home birth lost a baby that day, not our family."

What we would have liked to impart to all home birth parents in Australia is that we never agreed to a story that would play into the skewed and unoriginal rhetoric of doctors, who think a hospital birth is superior to a home birth. In our particular case the crux of the issue is that in our state, midwives have no standard licensure and anyone virtually can call themselves a midwife regardless of whether or not they are astutely trained as out of hospital midwives. The competence and training is our issue, not necessarily the licensure.

We believe good midwives need this distinction and poor providers need to be sanctioned through something that the state provides such as a board of registration of midwives where midwives decide what the credentialing process would be and where consumers can trust that they can get statistics on sanctions, IUFD, etc. so they can choose safe home birth knowing that their provider is trained at the gold standard of out of hospital birth care.

Secondarily, we believe that by doctors and legislators refusal to acknowledge that out of hospital birth is safe and cooperate with home birth parents and midwives, they are saying that mothers and babies are collateral damage for their reckless and dangerous policy of non-cooperation with mothers who birth at home and their trained providers.

Lastly, we said everything we did- which the show of course didn't show - in an effort to try to show legislators and doctors that we are the human toll for bad health care policy. This is for our own family, in our own state. We did not intend in any way to support the myth propagated by doctors and in this case- Sunday Night Australia - that home birth is dangerous. Bad health care policy and non-cooperation amongst professionals in perinatal care- now there is something dangerous!"


Jenifer Holloman

The Emmet Foundation

Offering Comfort to those who lose a baby

This note was sent to Jo Hunter, from Homebirth Australia (google for website).

[onthefly]

Congratulations on your beautiful birth Anna - I want one like that too!

I thought the show was pro-HB, but I WISH they would interview a 'health professional' who is not so anti-HB, at least another opinion from doc or midwife who've actually attended a HB, as lulu says.
For what it's worth, re the segment on the couple that lost their baby, I took it as an indictment of the health system there and criminalisation of homebirth midwives, not as 'proof' that hospitals and doctors were better.

[sunshine_sieben]

All in all, the segment wasn't bad.
Anna, what a beautiful birth! Congratulations!

Dr. Pesce was giving me the heebee jeebies, though. To someone who knows nothing about HB, his strong statements and blatant misinformation would have skewed the whole segment anti HB, I think. He kept saying that an Australian Hospital is the safest place in the world to have a baby these days. What is he basing that statement on?
Unfortunately, to many people watching this, who are likely to have been biased against HB to start with, his "professional" opinion would have held more weight than the opinion of a "hippie" HBing mum.
The more subtle things like the calmer HB baby, etc. would have gone unnoticed by many viewers. To some, a hysterically crying baby is a sign of good health.

However, it was probably the most balanced piece on the topic I have seen on mainstream media.

Sasa

By the way, I have had a FBC all natural waterbirth with DD and she didn't cry initially, then cried a little before being very calm and alert, then fallinng asleep. DS was born at home (was planned as a FBC waterbirth, but we never made it out of the door)) on the loungeroom floor with only my mum and DD present. It was not a peacful experience as such, as it wasn't planned like that. But I was at peace with the idea of him being born right there and then when I realised we weren't gonna make it to the BC. Nobody was stressing. He cried initially, but calmed the moment I put him to my chest.
So, I reckon your baby's state after birth is not only related to where he or she was born. It has a lot to do with the mother's stress levels and if being at home makes you feel relaxed, then chances are, your baby will be, too. Of course drugs during labour have a very profound effect on the baby's alertness.

[widdly]

I was very pleasantly surprised with how positive they actualy were to home birth! Based on their circumcision and vaccination stories and 'debates' last season, I was sure my blood would boil watching the HB story on Sunday night, but it seemed to me to be quite balanced.

Oh, and thankyou Anna for sharing such a wonderful birth!

[Smoke Jaguar]

Sasa - that was another aspect that got to me, about the state of Oz maternity services...there is absolutely NO evidence that says Australia is even in the top 5 countries for giving birth in safety! It's not just Pesce, it's a lot of Labor pollies spinning out this blatant mistruth. It is simply NOT true. I'm not saying it's a terrible place to give birth, but it's not the best by a long shot. The c-section rate, for one, belies this all by itself. Not to mention other measures of good outcomes (breastfeeding initiation and retention rates, PND outcomes, infant wellbeing beyond the post-partum period etc) that indicate a country with a good maternity service. It's either deluded self-belief or a bald-faced lie. Sadly, though, so many people just accept it as truth and Pesce knows this. He knows it because his profession is based on paying the OB and trusting what that person says - in many cases, disengaging from instinct and paying someone else to use theirs instead.
Why not interview someone like Dr Peter Lucas, who must be the last remaining GP obs who attends homebirths in Melbourne? As a medico, wouldn't he provide more 'balance'? I guess they just needed to have people 'for' and 'against' and not get anyone who transcended perceived boundaries...maybe they think viewers can't handle true balance.

[sunshine_sieben]

Mayaness, that's exactly what I meant, they should have had a professional on the other side of the argument, too. I found that the argument could have been perceived as "hospital birth is safe but clinical while HB is very dangerous, but more enjoyable" which plays quite nicely into the hands of those who say that HB is a selfish desire of some women who put their own "experience" above their baby's safety. Many people believe what the authority figure says without questioning it, unfortunately. Which is how we got to this state of affairs in the first place.

And although I can't seem to find those stats, I was under the impression that even in regards to maternal and infant mortality there were quite a few countries (like Japan) that had better stats than Australia.

Sasa

[Snacks]

Absolutely! Talk to someone who is a trained Dr but still knows something about homebirth! Someone like Andrew Bisits who's the head OB at a hospital which offers homebirthing services.

[Smoke Jaguar]

Never ceases to amaze me that accusation of wanting a HB for 'selfish' reasons! Why else do women have epidurals (in the cases where it's not medically necessary) and pain relief? For themselves - it's not a decision made with the concerns about effects on the newborn taken into consideration, is it?
Was it Pesce in that Senate hearing who said the 'downside' to HB is that women can't access pain relief drugs? If it wasn't him (could have been a Labor MP)it was someone else that week who said it and I laughed so much at the arrogance of that statement! We're 'selfish' then, because we value this way of our children coming into the world and being at our own hormonal optimum to receive that child. Why would a woman choose to ignore the pain relief drugs that men so thoughtfully invented and used to enforce upon birthing women in hospitals? Geez, we must be so shortsighted!
Oh, well, these issues can't ever be covered in a short piece on commercial TV. I'm just glad they had Anna's story with the good outcome, instead of fishing for a bad Australian outcome.

[Melody7]

I thought the show was pro-HB, but I WISH they would interview a 'health professional' who is not so anti-HB, at least another opinion from doc or midwife who've actually attended a HB, as lulu says.

This is what's really infuriating - they DID interview several other professionals - Anna's independant midwife (seen, but not heard in the segment) and Dr Hannah Dahlen (Assoc Professor of Midwifery at Uni of West Syd; Secretary of Aust College of Midwives), among others. Both would have spoken of the safety of homebirth and refuted the stats quoted by Pesce....

[Cassius2]

i thought that as far as a HB story on a commercial 'prime-time' channel it was fairly open and attempting to come across as scoping the debates.

however, at the end of the day they still only gave us the 'tragic home-birth' example. i'm sorry but the australian hospital system also have statistics, so why do we only get told of the homebirth tragedies? especially, as the US family later wrote in response, when the whole point of them showing their story was cut and edited out only to be replaced with the 'dangers' facing every HB...pffffffft.

sorry, i did appreciate the effort overall, but it still irks me that with EVERY HB story they have to have the personal tragedy (as though it is par for the course).

[sunshine_sieben]

Mmmmm, I know this is an old thread. But I have had a thought about it recently, sparked by a post Kelly wrote about Breastfeeding.
Her point was that if someone presents both sides of the sory, but subtely (sp?) steers you in one direction over the other, his argument is even stronger. At least that's how I read it.

Why do the commercial baby milk companies offer pro and con lists that acknowledge some of their product's shortcomings? Because any "balanced" approach that is presented in a heavily biased culture automatically supports the bias. If A and B are nearly equivalent, and if more than 90% of mothers ultimately choose B, as mothers in the United States do (according to an unpublished 1992 Mothers' Survey by Ross Laboratories that indicated fewer than 10% of U.S. mothers nursing at a year), it makes sense to follow the majority. If there were an important difference, surely the health profession would make a point of not staying out of the decision-making process.

Taken from "Breasfeeding is NOT best" https://www.bellybelly.com.au/forums...-not-best.html

I think this sort of applies here, too.
If they had only shown one side of the story, many people would have recognised the open bias and not taken the piece too seriously.
However, since they made an effort to present both sides, the conclusion that HB is dangerous is "obviously" correct and the argument has much more weight. The fully informed audience is coming to this conclusion all on its own.

It is like the OB who says that he is pro-natural birth and then starts talking c/s at 28 weeks because the baby is too larg, the pelvis too smal or any other arbitrary reason why this particular woman is "not suitable" for a natural birth. Had he said right from the start that he thinks that c/s are the gold standard of birth, the woman could have made the decision to seek out a less biased OB.